Use a color wheel to learn how hues are mixed.
We learn the basics of color mixing in elementary school---red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green, blue and red make purple. If you're learning paint, these basic rules of mixing primary colors become useful. Artist quality paints are expensive, and it's impractical to buy every color you see. In fact, most art teachers will discourage students from buying many different colors, particularly black. Mixing your own paints creates truer and more natural colors.
Instructions
1. Study the color wheel. Find an image of a color wheel online, and print it out. Or make your own color wheel. A basic color wheel will be the shape of a circle divided into 12 pie pieces. The three primary colors---red, yellow and blue---will be at three equally distant points on the circle. Between each primary color will be a progression of secondary and tertiary colors. For example, three color slices appear between red and blue. The center color is violet. Between red and violet is the color red-violet and between violet and blue is blue-violet. The colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel, like red and green, are complementary colors. They are opposites that when combined, create black.
2. Gather your supplies. To mix a variety of colors, all you need are red, blue, yellow and white paints. As you advance at mixing colors, you can try different shades. Colors come in warm and cool shades that change the mixed result. Some basic colors to start out with are titanium white, ultramarine blue, Prussian blue, thalo green, viridian green, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, cadmium red and alizarin crimson. You also need paper towels for blotting, a palette and palette knife. If you are using acrylic paints, you can use water to rinse your brush. For oil paints, use a jar of artist's mineral spirits to clean the brushes.
3. Set up your palette. Squeeze out a quarter-size glob of a blue, red and yellow on your palette, spaced widely apart. Also squeeze out a slightly larger glob of white.
4. Start mixing the secondary colors. Do this by taking your palette knife, scooping up a bit of red and a bit of yellow, then mixing them. Notice how the amount of each paint you add changes the orange color. Then mix the two other secondary colors, green and violet by mixing the other primary colors.
5. Once your secondary colors are mixed, try mixing tertiary colors. The tertiary colors are red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet and red-violet. These colors are created by mixing a secondary color, like violet, and a primary color, like red, to create red-violet.
6. Now you can create different shades of the colors. On your palette, smear three small globs of each color. Add a small amount of white to the first glob, and mix it. Then add a slightly larger amount of white to the second glob of that color. Then add even more white to the third glob. Notice the different shades of lightness and darkness that you get out of each color.
7. Create black by adding equal parts of complementary colors, like red and green. If the shade seems too warm, add some more green and vice versa. Then practice adding a bit of black to each of your mixed colors to make them darker.
